


Sights

by skyjacklegion



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blindness, Gen, Head Injury, Implied Relationship, Permanent Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 20:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7328992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyjacklegion/pseuds/skyjacklegion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was painfully aware that he’d taken half a building to the face. He wasn’t in complete darkness; blindness, he found, often didn’t work like that. He had light instead. So much light it was literally blinding, the optic nerve damaged. The injury had healed and scarred over but what was left of his pupil and iris went silver. Clouded.</p><p>“This can’t be fixed.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sights

Thirty years was a long time to adjust to something. Jack’d always been good at keeping on top of things, good at picking himself up and _soldiering_ on. Time with Overwatch had helped him adjust to the whole super soldier thing, so five years was comparatively just a-

It wasn’t exactly thirty, but he’d take it.  

_Penetrating eye injury_ she’d said. As if the giant pieces of metal to the face hadn’t told him enough. The burns hadn’t- The blood hadn’t-

He was painfully aware that he’d taken half a building to the face. He wasn’t in complete darkness; blindness, he found, often didn’t work like that. He had _light_ instead. So much light it was literally blinding, the optic nerve damaged. The injury had healed and scarred over but what was left of his pupil and iris went silver. Clouded.

“This can’t be fixed.” She’d told him, blunt. Gentle with it, hands on the side of his face, fingers skirting the angry, red edge of his scars.

She refused to let him wallow, once she’d found him sitting feeling sorry for himself three weeks later, having done barely anything but walk to the bathroom and back. He’d always been better at taking orders than giving them (an old sore point) so he did what she told him to. He’d wondered, after a while, if she’d known who he was. His face had been splashed across the screen so many times it was a wonder she’d not turned him over at all. He’s alive, they’d have said, dragging him through press releases and hiding him away from the world. Making him take the blame for Reyes’ ego, for his own. As if he didn’t blame himself enough.

Nothing good came of thinking like that, so he turned it off. Another skill learned watching his betters.

Fuck, he missed them.

The visor, or at least the prototype, had been the doctor's idea. Medical advancements, blah blah blah but when he put it on and it _blocked out light_ -

It’d felt like he stepped out of the flames for the first time. Gave him a reference point. He couldn’t see again, nothing could bring that back but the lack of white noise coming from his broken, scarred eyes gave him some breathing room. He didn’t have to lie back and stare at a ceiling hoping that he’d get a break in the oranges, whites and greens splashed across what little remained of his vision. He didn’t have the hope that it was maybe his eyes trying to repair themselves.

His brain firing off impulses and getting nothing back would’ve torn him apart eventually. It’d been a surreal experience, watching his doctor walk from one end of the room to the other. A lack of light in a splash of intense colour. No definition, just a dark blob but it was _enough_.

It wasn’t the first time he’d let a doctor fiddle and fart around with his life. He was distressingly used to it.

The anger, though? That didn’t come until later.

__

The thing about anger is that it gives you a focus and makes you stupid all at the same goddamn time. He made mistakes; he’d thought his visor was a crutch more than anything else so he went without it as much as he could, regardless of how uncomfortable it made him. A full face mask, something to hide the line of his jaw, the twist of his mouth as he brought his rifle down onto a skull. The first time the visor came off he got the shit kicked out of him. The second, he didn’t.

He’d thought about using some sort of excuse, if he was caught. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I was hurt, I was angry, I was _lying_ ’.

He’d read his file, before the _incident_. Angela had been worried about PTSD or whatever the fuck else she’d wanted to peg on him, like he wasn’t aware of how fucked up his own brain was. He’d been constantly amazed at the fact that the safety of the world was entrusted to a bunch of people with enough alphabet soup conditions to bring the roof down. Literally, as it’d turned out.

She hadn’t been one to talk, either. Her fear of ageing, of death? That’d fucked with all of them in the end.

 ___

He’d stolen his rifle from Grand Mesa, tinkered with his visor again and again.

He’d discovered just what he could and couldn’t do without the damn thing and stomped right past it. _Defies Expectations_ , they’d said in his file and fuck if they weren’t right. He was blind. Braille was a shit to learn but he’d done it; funneled money into programs to teach blind kids to learn as well, given how goddamn long it’d taken him. He’d considered, for a moment, getting a dog before he’d settled on it being a liability. Too noticeable. Too damn stupid to take the right order at the right time.

Maybe he’d change his mind. Maybe not. Mostly, he just made do, fuelled by a mix of anger and guilt.

Mostly guilt.

__

Gabe’s family loved Jack. Of course they did, he was a respectful boy who grew into a respectful man, their Gabriel’s best friend. The idiot white boy they could poke fun at, feed and get too drunk to stand. At least until the end of their _modifications_. It took a lot to get them drunk after that.

“Por favor,” Jack’d say, holding his hand to his stomach and begging off more food but Gabe’s tiny, terrifying Abuela would not be denied so they’d end up flopped on the hood of Jack’s truck at one in the morning, sharing a cigarette and staring at the landing lights of the planes overhead. It was sticky and disgustingly hot but neither of them wanted to be the one to take off their jacket first.

“You could weaponise her taquitos.” Jack said, and Gabe nearly shoved him off the truck.

“You’re too white to say that properly.”

Laughing hurt, but they did anyway.

__

He ignored Recall for a week. The flashing icon he couldn’t see in the corner of his old email address that he’d accessed because he-

He missed it. He missed _them_ . He was so fucking _angry_ over what Gabriel had done, who he’d become, what his pride had turned him into. That he hadn’t seen it coming, or worse. It was still fresh in his mind, the things they’d said, what they’d done. The look on his _face-_

He’d seen it coming from a mile off, the thought niggling at the back of his mind, and he’d done not a fucking _thing_ to stop it.

That girl in Dorado had called him a hero.

Fuck.

__

When he was in the army, it was simple. Take orders, do what you’re told and don’t ask questions. Let us stick you full of needles, make you better, faster and stronger than anyone you’ve ever known and we’ll do this for your own good. You’re helping your country, son. You’re a hero, son. Nobody’ll know your name, son.

Strike Commander Morrison. His face was on every poster, his stupid goddamn half-visor in every photograph. He’d killed a lot of Omnics in the war, killed a lot of people since then. It was a hard habit to break.

He’d tried. Leaving people alive was harder than shooting them in the face, and the fury riding under his skin drove his dreams to strange places. Colours and faces he hadn’t seen in _years_ , broad hands and gentle mouths that left him shaking when he woke, lonely and tired.

His knees almost buckled with the first step he took on the docks at Gibraltar, so he locked them, standing straight backed, rifle over one shoulder and dufflebag over the other. Breathing.

The visor showed him the way, a soft pulse of light that set off a cacophony of colours in his head. As much home as anything else, the concrete and steel familiar under his boots, the smell of the ocean and the heavy tang of oil and old gunpowder at the back of his tongue.

__

Jack’s mother hated Gabe. Not because he was Latino, although given the genetic makeup of the town it wouldn’t be much of a stretch. No, she hated him because he was impossible to dislike. He was all booming laughter and heavy hands, an arm slung across Jack’s shoulders and stupid beanie hanging from his back pocket.

“Every time he brings you home, he leaves a little sooner.” She said to him, elbows deep in suds, the both of them side by side at the huge sink.

“Every time he leaves with me, he comes back home again.” Gabriel replied after a long pause. The companionable elbow in his side reminded him so much of Jack it actually hurt.

___

Talon. What a goddamn stupid name for a fucking _stupid_ concept, a group of people who wanted what? World domination? To make their own team of superpowered monsters to ruin the lives of everyone present?

Why anyone would _want_ world domination was beyond him. He’d had a hard enough time with a bunch of superpowered idiots trying to _save_ the world.

___

“You got old.” Gabe said, like he wasn’t an amorphous smoke monster made of teeth and determination. Jack’s laugh was bitter and twisted, his visor cracked and smashed against the wall, rifle held at his shoulder.

A scream off to the left. It sounded like Lena. He spared a second to think about the girl who’d climbed into the slipstream and torn herself from time because she’d believed in what they’d said. Believed in _them_.

“You got ugly.” Jack said in response, listening for the way he moved, feeling the smoke curl around his ankles, the hand at his jacket. He waited, silent and patient, until _Reaper_ leaned in before he fired a Helix rocket straight into him, stumbled with the force of the hand being ripped from his jacket. Stood his ground.

“I’m blind, not stupid.” He said when the wheeze of surprise stopped, when the light scattered behind his eyes dimmed for a second.

“I can see that.” Came the reply, laughter echoing first to the right, then to the left and back again. Behind him.

His visor, pressed against his chest, crackled against the leather. He lowered the rifle to take it, although not by much, eyes narrowed, the scars across his face creasing his skin as he did so. He slid it back on, the clips on the lower mask holding it in place, the lights behind his eyes fading into a calm, dark brown colour that had-

Gabe was gone.

  
___

 

“What’s it like, being blind?” Hana asked, leaning over the back of the chair. Jack didn’t say anything for a long moment, shrugging a shoulder and batting at her hand as she tried to poke him in the ear. She was young, got up in your space just to see what happened.

Honestly, Jack had to wonder if she understood how many levels he could answer that question on. He was far more patient now. Angrier, but more considered.

“I’m used to it.”

__

  



End file.
